RFC 7735

Tracking Reviews of Documents

Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) R. Sparks
Request for Comments: 7735 Oracle
Category: Informational T. Kivinen
ISSN: 2070-1721 INSIDE Secure
January 2016 Tracking Reviews of Documents
Abstract
Several review teams ensure specific types of review are performed on
Internet-Drafts as they progress towards becoming RFCs. The tools
used by these teams to assign and track reviews would benefit from
tighter integration to the Datatracker. This document discusses
requirements for improving those tools without disrupting current
work flows.
Status of This Memo
This document is not an Internet Standards Track specification; it is
published for informational purposes.
This document is a product of the Internet Engineering Task Force
(IETF). It represents the consensus of the IETF community. It has
received public review and has been approved for publication by the
Internet Engineering Steering Group (IESG). Not all documents
approved by the IESG are a candidate for any level of Internet
Standard; see Section 2 of RFC 5741.
Information about the current status of this document, any errata,
and how to provide feedback on it may be obtained at
http://www.rfc-editor.org/info/rfc7735.
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some effort. Tighter integration with the Datatracker would simplify
the logic used to identify documents that are ready for review, make
it simpler for the Datatracker to associate reviews with documents,
and allow users to reuse their Datatracker credentials. It would
also make it easier to detect other potential review-triggering
events, such as a document entering Working Group (WG) Last Call or
when an RFC's standard level is being changed without revising the
RFC. Tero currently believes this integration is best achieved by a
new implementation of the tool. This document captures requirements
for that reimplementation, with a focus on the workflows that the new
implementation must take care not to disrupt. It also discusses new
features, including changes suggested for the existing tool at its
issue tracker [art-trac].
For more information about the various review teams, see the
following references.
+-------------------------------+---------------------+
| General Area Review Team | [Gen-ART] [RFC6385] |
| Security Directorate | [SecDir] |
| Applications Area Directorate | [AppsDir] |
| Operations Area Directorate | [OPS-dir] |
| Routing Area Directorate | [RTG-dir] |
| MIB Doctors | [MIBdoctors] |
| YANG Doctors | [YANGdoctors] |
+-------------------------------+---------------------+
2. Overview of Current Workflows
This section gives a high-level overview of how the review team
secretaries and reviewers use the existing tool. It is not intended
to be comprehensive documentation of how review teams operate.
Please see the references for those details.
For many teams, the team's secretary periodically (typically once a
week) checks the tool for documents it has identified as ready for
review. The tool compiles a list from Last Call announcements and
IESG Telechat agendas. The secretary creates a set of assignments
from this list and enters them into the reviewer pool, choosing the
reviewers in roughly a round-robin order. That order can be
perturbed by several factors. Reviewers have different levels of
availability. Some are willing to review multiple documents a month.
Others may only be willing to review a document every other month.
The assignment process takes exceptional conditions such as reviewer
vacations into account. Furthermore, secretaries are careful not to
assign a document to a reviewer that is an author, shepherd,
responsible WG chair, or has some other already existing association
with the document. The preference is to get a reviewer with a fresh

perspective. The secretary may discover reasons to change
assignments while going through the list of documents. In order to
not cause a reviewer to make a false start on a review, the
secretaries complete the full list of assignments before sending
notifications to anyone. This assignment process can take several
minutes and it is possible for new Last Calls to be issued while the
secretary is making assignments. The secretary typically checks to
see if new documents are ready for review just before issuing the
assignments and updates the assignments if necessary.
Some teams operate in more of a review-on-demand model. The Routing
Area Directorate (RTG-dir), for example, primarily initiates reviews
at the request of a Routing AD. They may also start an early review
at the request of a WG chair. In either case, the reviewers are
chosen manually from the pool of available reviewers driven by
context rather than using a round-robin ordering.
The issued assignments are either sent to the review team's email
list or are emailed directly to the assigned reviewer. The
assignments are reflected in the tool. For those teams handling
different types of reviews (Last Call vs. Telechat, for example), the
secretary typically processes the documents for each type of review
separately, and potentially with different assignment criteria. In
Gen-ART, for example, the Last Call reviewer for a document will
almost always get the follow-up Telechat review assignment.
Similarly, SecDir assigns any re-reviews of a document to the same
reviewer. Other teams may choose to assign a different reviewer.
Reviewers discover their assignments through email or by looking at
their queue in the tool. The secretaries for some teams (such as the
OPS-dir and RTG-dir) insulate their team members from using the tool
directly. These reviewers only work through the review team's email
list or through direct email. On teams that have the reviewers use
the tool directly, most reviewers only check the tool when they see
they have an assignment via the team's email list. A reviewer has
the opportunity to reject the assignment for any reason. While the
tool provides a way to reject assignments, reviewers typically use
email to coordinate rejections with the team secretary. The
secretary will find another volunteer for any rejected assignments.
The reviewer can indicate that the assignment is accepted in the tool
before starting the review, but this feature is rarely used.
The reviewer sends a completed review to the team's email list or
secretary, as well as any other lists relevant to the review, and
usually the draft's primary email alias. For instance, many Last
Call reviews are also sent to the IETF general list. The teams
typically have a template format for the review. Those templates
usually start with a summary of the conclusion of the review.

Typical summaries are "ready for publication" or "on the right track
but has open issues". The reviewer (or in the case of teams that
insulate their reviewers, the secretary) uses the tool to indicate
that the review is complete, provides the summary, and has an
opportunity to provide a link to the review in the archives. Note,
however, that having to wait for the document to appear in the
archive to know the link to paste into the tool is a significant
enough impedance that this link is often not provided by the
reviewer. The SecDir secretary manually collects these links from
the team's email list and adds them to the tool.
Occasionally, a document is revised between when a review assignment
is made and when the reviewer starts the review. Different teams can
have different policies about whether the reviewer should review the
assigned version or the current version.
3. Requirements
3.1. Secretariat Focused
o The Secretariat must be able to configure secretaries and
reviewers for review teams (by managing Role records).
o The Secretariat must be able to perform any secretary action on
behalf of a review team secretary (and thus, must be able to
perform any reviewer action on behalf of the reviewer).
3.2. Review-Team Secretary Focused
o A secretary must be able to see what documents are ready for a
review of a given type (such as a Last Call review).
o A secretary must be able to assign reviews for documents that may
not have been automatically identified as ready for a review of a
given type. (In addition to being the primary assignment method
for teams that only initiate reviews on demand, this allows the
secretary to work around errors and handle special cases,
including early review requests.)
o A secretary must be able to work on and issue a set of assignments
as an atomic unit. No assignment should be issued until the
secretary declares the set of assignments complete.
o The tool must support teams that have multiple secretaries. The
tool should warn secretaries that are simultaneously working on
assignments and protect against conflicting assignments being
made.

o It must be easy for the secretary to discover that more documents
have become ready for review while working on an assignment set.
o The tool should make preparing the assignment email to the team's
email list easy. For instance, the tool could prepare the
message, give the secretary an opportunity to edit it, and handle
sending it to the team's email list.
o It must be possible for a secretary to indicate that the review
team will not provide a review for a document (or a given version
of a document). This indication should be taken into account when
presenting the documents that are ready for a review of a given
type. This will also make it possible to show on a document's
page that no review is expected from this team.
o A secretary must be able to easily see who the next available
reviewers are, in order.
o A secretary must be able to edit a reviewer's availability, both
in terms of frequency, not-available-until-date, and skip-next-
n-assignments. (See the description of these settings in
Section 3.3.)
o The tool should make it easy for the secretary to see any team
members that have requested to review a given document when it
becomes available for review.
o The tool should make it easy for the secretary to identify that a
reviewer is already involved with a document. The current tool
allows the secretary to provide a regular expression to match
against the document name. If the expression matches, the
document is not available for assignment to this reviewer. For
example, Tero will not be assigned documents matching '^draft-
(kivinen|ietf-tcpinc)-.*$'. The tool should also take any roles,
such as document shepherd, that the Datatracker knows about into
consideration.
o The tool should make it easy for the secretary to see key features
of a document ready for assignment, such as its length, its
authors, the group and area it is associated with, its title and
abstract, its states (such as IESG or WG states), and any other
personnel (such as the shepherd and reviewers already assigned
from other teams) involved in the draft.
o The tool must make it easy for the secretary to detect and process
re-review requests on the same version of a document (such as when
a document has an additional Last Call only to deal with new IPR
information).

o Common operations to groups of documents should be easy for the
secretary to process as a group with a minimum amount of
interaction with the tool. For instance, it should be possible to
process all of the documents described by the immediately
preceding bullet with one action. Similarly, for teams that
assign re-reviews to the same reviewer, issuing all re-review
requests should be a simple action.
o A secretary must be able to see which reviewers have outstanding
assignments.
o The tool must make it easy for the secretary to see the result of
previous reviews from this team for a given document. In SecDir,
for example, if the request is for a revision that has only minor
differences and the previous review result was "Ready", a new
assignment will not be made. If the given document replaces one
or more other prior documents, the tool must make it easy for the
secretary to see the results of previous reviews of the replaced
documents.
o The tool must make it easy for the secretary to see the result of
previous reviews from this team for all documents across
configurable, recent periods of time (such as the last 12 months).
A secretary of the RTG-dir, for example, would use this result to
aid in the manual selection of the next reviewer.
o The tools must make it easy for the secretary to see the recent
performance of a reviewer while making an assignment (see
Section 3.5). This allows the secretary to detect overburdened or
unresponsive volunteers earlier in the process.
o A secretary must be able to configure the tool to remind them to
follow up when actions are due. (For instance, a secretary could
receive email when a review is about to become overdue.)
o A secretary must be able to assign multiple reviewers to a given
draft at any time. In particular, a secretary must be able to
assign an additional reviewer when an original reviewer indicates
their review is likely to be only partially complete.
o A secretary must be able to withdraw a review assignment.
o A secretary must be able to perform any reviewer action on behalf
of the reviewer.
o A secretary must be able to configure the review team's set of
reviewers (by managing Role records for the team).

o Information about a reviewer must not be lost when a reviewer is
removed from a team. (Frequently, reviewers come back to teams
later.)
o A secretary must be able to delegate secretary capabilities in the
tool (similar to how a working group chair can assign a Delegate).
This allows review teams to self-manage secretary vacations.
3.3. Reviewer Focused
o A reviewer must be able to indicate availability, both in
frequency of reviews and as "not available until this date". The
current tool speaks of frequency in these terms:
- Assign at maximum one new review per week
- Assign at maximum one new review per fortnight
- Assign at maximum one new review per month
- Assign at maximum one new review per two months
- Assign at maximum one new review per quarter
o Reviewers must be able to indicate hiatus periods. Each period
may be either "soft" or "hard".
- A hiatus must have a start date. It may have an end date or it
may be indefinite.
- During a hiatus, the reviewer will not be included in the
normal review rotation. When a provided end date is reached,
the reviewer will automatically be included in the rotation in
their usual order.
- During a "soft" hiatus, the reviewer must not be assigned new
reviews but is expected to complete existing assignments and do
follow-up reviews.
- During a "hard" hiatus, the reviewer must not be assigned any
new reviews and the secretary must be prompted to reassign any
outstanding or follow-up reviews.
o Reviewers must be able to indicate that they should be skipped the
next "n" times they would normally have received an assignment.

o Reviewers must be able to indicate that they are transitioning to
inactive and provide a date for the end of the transition period.
During this transition time, the reviewer must not be assigned new
reviews but is expected to complete outstanding assignments and
follow-up reviews. At the end of the transition period, the
secretary must be prompted to reassign any outstanding or follow-
up reviews. (This allows review-team members that are taking on
AD responsibility to transition gracefully to an inactive state
for the team.)
o Both the reviewer and the secretary will be notified by email of
any modifications to a reviewer's availability.
o A reviewer must be able to easily discover new review assignments.
(The tool might send email directly to an assigned reviewer in
addition to sending the set of assignments to the team's email
list. The tool might also use the Django Message framework to let
a reviewer that's logged into the Datatracker know a new review
assignment has been made.)
o Reviewers must be able to see their current set of outstanding
assignments, completed assignments, and rejected assignments. The
presentation of those sets should either be separate or, if
combined, the sets should be visually distinct.
o A reviewer should be able to request to review a particular
document. The draft may be in any state: available and
unassigned; already assigned to another reviewer; or not yet
available.
o A reviewer must be able to reject a review assignment, optionally
providing the secretary with an explanation for the rejection.
The tool will notify the secretary of the rejection by email.
o A reviewer must be able to indicate that they have accepted and
are working on an assignment.
o A reviewer must be able to indicate that a review is only
partially completed and ask the secretary to assign an additional
reviewer. The tool will notify the secretary of this condition by
email.
o It should be possible for a reviewer to reject or accept a review
either by using the tool's web interface or by replying to the
review assignment email.
o It must be easy for a reviewer to see when each assigned review is
due.

o A reviewer must be able to configure the tool to remind them when
actions are due. (For instance, a reviewer could receive email
when a review is about to become overdue).
o A reviewer must be able to indicate that a review is complete,
capturing where the review is in the archives and the high-level,
review-result summary.
o It must be possible for a reviewer to clearly indicate which
version of a document was reviewed. Documents are sometimes
revised between when a review was assigned and when it is due.
The tool should note the current version of the document and
highlight when the review is not for the current version.
o It must be easy for a reviewer to submit a completed review.
- The current workflow, where the reviewer sends email to the
team's email list (possibly copying other lists) and then
indicates where to find that review, must continue to be
supported. The tool should make it easier to capture the link
to review in the team's email list archives (perhaps by
suggesting links based on a search into the archives).
- The tool should allow the reviewer to enter the review into the
tool via a web form (either as directly provided text or
through a file-upload mechanism). The tool will ensure the
review is posted to the appropriate lists and will construct
the links to those posts in the archives.
- The tool could also allow the reviewer to submit the review to
the tool by email (perhaps by replying to the assignment). The
tool would then ensure the review is posted to the appropriate
lists.
3.4. Review Requester and Consumer Focused
o It should be easy for an AD or group chair to request any type of
review, but particularly an early review, from a review team.
o It should be possible for that person to withdraw a review
request.
o It must be easy to find all reviews of a document when looking at
the document's main page in the Datatracker. The reference to the
review must make it easy to see any responses to the review on the
email lists it was sent to. If a document "replaces" one or more
other documents, reviews of the replaced documents should be
included in the results.

o It must be easy to find all reviews of a document when looking at
search result pages and other lists of documents, such as the
documents on an IESG Telechat agenda.
3.5. Statistics Focused
o It must be easy to see the following across all teams, a given
team, or a given reviewer, and independently across all time or
across configurable recent periods of time:
- how many reviews have been completed
- how many reviews are in progress
- how many in progress reviews are late
- how many completed reviews were late
- how many reviews were not completed at all
- average time to complete reviews (from assignment to
completion)
o It must be easy to see the following for all teams, for a given
team, or for a given reviewer, across all time or across
configurable recent periods:
- total counts of reviews in each review state (done, rejected,
etc.)
- total counts of completed reviews by result (ready, ready with
nits, etc.)
o The above statistics should also be calculated reflecting the size
of the documents being reviewed (such as using the number of pages
or words in the documents).
o Where applicable, statistics should take reviewer hiatus periods
into account.
o Access to the above statistics must be easy to configure. Access
will be initially limited as follows:
- The Secretariat and ADs can see any statistic.
- A team secretary can see any statistics for that team.

class ReviewResultSet(models.Model):
"""
This table provides a way to point out a set of ReviewResultName
entries that are valid for a given team in order to be able to
limit the result choices that can be set for a given review as a
function of which team it is related to.
"""
team = models.ForeignKey(Group)
valid = models.ManyToManyField(ReviewResultName)
class ReviewRequest(models.Model):
"""
There should be one ReviewRequest entered for each combination of
document, rev, and reviewer.
"""
# Fields filled in on the initial record creation:
time = models.DateTimeField(auto_now_add=True)
type = models.ReviewTypeName()
doc = models.ForeignKey(Document,
related_name='review_request_set')
team = models.ForeignKey(Group)
deadline = models.DateTimeField()
requested_rev = models.CharField(verbose_name="requested_revision",
max_length=16, blank=True)
state = models.ForeignKey(ReviewRequestStateName)
# Fields filled in as reviewer is assigned, and as the review
# is uploaded
reviewer = models.ForeignKey(Reviewer, null=True, blank=True)
review = models.OneToOneField(Document, null=True,
blank=True)
reviewed_rev = models.CharField(verbose_name="reviewed_revision",
max_length=16, blank=True)
result = models.ForeignKey(ReviewResultName)
Appendix B. Suggested Features Deferred for Future Work
Brian Carpenter suggested a set of author/editor-focused requirements
that were deferred for another iteration of improvement. These
include providing a way for the editors to acknowledge receipt of the
review, potentially tracking the email conversation between the
reviewer and document editor, and indicating which review topics the
editor believes a new revision addresses.